Wind in the Wires

by Joy Dettman

  Jim has written to his Willama solicitors about Vern’s house. It’s been vacant for a while. They say it needs a bit of work . . .

  Scott and Wilson, the Willama solicitors, replied by return mail, with a manila envelope containing a bulk of papers. Jim had been six years old when his mother died on an operating table. Vern Hooper was her second husband, Jim her only issue. Her first husband’s money had been placed into a trust fund for her son. Untouched for thirty-odd years, it had ballooned.

  Scott and Wilson released money enough to buy a two-toned Ford Customline. Too big for Jenny, but it fitted Jim’s long legs. A Frankston solicitor was given the job of fixing up the paperwork which would give Raelene into the Keatings’ care.

  Jenny took her driving test in August, in Vroni’s car. Jim left his job at the timber yards on 29 August, the day Florence and Clarrie drove to the solicitor’s office to sign the papers.

  Happy Florence that day, bawling Florence as she hugged, kissed Jenny, hugged Jim who, not expecting it, almost lost his footing. Clarrie shook their hands.

  Raelene, who didn’t like that baby and called Jim ‘Gimpy’, didn’t kiss or shake hands with anyone. Poked her tongue out at Gimpy, or Trudy, as the Keatings’ car drove away.

  The Frankston solicitor was responsible for Jenny’s second registry-office wedding. He’d told them they were wasting their time thinking about adopting the baby unless they married.

  Jenny’s ‘until death do us part’ vow sounded different the second time. No new ring necessary. The gold band she’d worn for sixteen years, though well worn, had worn well. It came off for two minutes while the words were read, then Jen and Jim, 1942 slid back to where it belonged.

  WOODY CREEK GOSSIP

  Charlie’s new tenant had mowed Vern Hooper’s lawns before vacating the big house on the corner. It took a while for a buffalo lawn to become a cow paddock. Vern’s lawns were long enough to qualify. Weeds, ostracised for years, denied their right to breed, had got their roots down and shed their million seeds. Birds bred beneath the abandoned veranda – as did a few of the bored town youth. Beer bottles, cigarette packets, a condom told its own tale.

  The rosebush hedge, denied its winter pruning, reached out to grasp the attention of walkers and bike riders. Windblown newspapers snagged on rose thorns, waved to passers-by, while brown paper bags danced merrily along the verandas, sidestepping the splatter of birds who found perches at night in the rafters.

  ‘What a terrible waste of good living space,’ people said. ‘They’ve got six bedrooms in that house, two bathrooms, two sitting rooms.’

  ‘They say it’s sold. Marylyn was saying that there was a car parked in the drive for two hours on Wednesday. She didn’t recognise the driver, but he had a key.’

  ‘Another Melbourne retiree. The town is getting overrun by Melbourne retirees.’

  ‘She said he looked too young to be one of them.’

  The chap came again, left again. The rains came and left. The rosebush hedge had begun to shake off its spiny mood when they came in force, an army of small trucks, utes, sedans, to park in Vern’s drive, on his cow-paddock lawns. One came with paint cans and ladder, one with rolls of carpet. One was Percival Scott, a Willama solicitor.

  Maisy Macdonald heard about Percival Scott from Nelly Dobson, who had been employed by the Hooper family for years. Together they came up with a possible answer. Scott and Wilson had been Vern Hooper’s solicitors, back before the war. They decided that one of the Hoopers was moving back to town.

  Vern Hopper, dead since ’52, had produced three offspring. All three were still living. Jim, the only son, had spent two years in a Jap prisoner-of-war camp. He’d lost half of one leg, some said his sight, and a few still believed he’d lost his mind over there. It was generally agreed that he wouldn’t be the one moving back to town.

  Lorna, unwed, heading for fifty, had made her views on Woody Creek society very clear during her years in the town She wouldn’t come back. Which left Margaret.

  ‘It will be Margaret. She was on the Red Cross committee for years,’ Maisy said.

  ‘She got married, you know. She brought her husband up here that time to their manager’s funeral. What age would she be now?’

  ‘Well into her forties. When my Rachel was nineteen, Margaret was twenty-six,’ Maisy said, doing her sums on her fingers. She’d produced eight daughters before presenting her husband, George, with twin sons. ‘She’d have to be forty-eight, or close to it,’ Maisy said.

  Vern’s roses were sprouting leaves, even buds, when the furniture van arrived. Two chaps unloaded a large refrigerator, a washing machine, a bed, table and chairs – and a baby’s cot.

  It warranted a phone call from the nearest neighbour to her mother. ‘Someone is moving in. They just unloaded a cot. One of those polished wooden ones.’ The nearest neighbour had a fine view of Vern Hooper’s driveway from her eastern window.

  Dawn Macdonald worked at the telephone exchange. She passed the news on to her mother. Maisy passed it on to umpteen more, and before that day was done, the town had Margaret Hooper breeding up a change-of-life family.

  ‘She was always a gentle dithery little thing. She’d probably make a good mother.’

  *

  They came on a Thursday in late September, in a showroom-new, two-toned green Ford Customline, and for minutes the telephone exchange ran hot.

  ‘It’s Jenny Morrison. She’s standing on Vern Hooper’s veranda, Mum, and she’s had another one. It’s in one of those baby baskets, and there’s a tall grey-headed bloke with her who has to be Jim Hooper.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Jenny Morrison. She’s got a baby and the bloke with her is unlocking Vern’s front door.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m telling you she is, and that bloke is definitely Jim Hooper. He just took his glasses off.’

  ‘The last I heard, he was in an insane asylum.’

  ‘She never was too fussy. Wasn’t she on with him years ago?’

  ‘She had a boy to him. Her husband is hardly cold in his grave! How old is the baby?’

  ‘How can I see that from where I am? It doesn’t look heavy. They’ve gone inside. He’s limping badly.’

  ‘That’s how she ran him down.’

  ‘I thought he was supposed to be half-blind?’

  ‘He was wearing dark glasses at Vern’s funeral and didn’t seem to recognise me when I spoke to him.’

  ‘They’ve got a car, a big classy-looking two-toned green thing.’

  There were more walkers about that afternoon, a few stopping to look at Vern’s overgrown roses. At midday, smoke was seen coming from Vern’s kitchen chimney. At one-thirty Jenny Morrison was sighted hanging napkins on the clothes line, and again the telephone exchange ran hot.

  Two o’clock and Elsie Hall, who never walked into town, walked in alone, or walked as far as Hooper’s corner. She went inside and didn’t come out. At four-thirty, Josie, Elsie’s youngest, jumped off the school bus and made a beeline for Hooper’s.

  ‘Darkies wandering in and out of his house, Vern must be rolling over in his grave. She didn’t bring that retarded boy back with her?’

  ‘I heard that she put him in a home a few days after his father was killed.’

  ‘What about that dark-headed girl who was supposed to be Ray King’s?’

  ‘She’s not with them, or if she is, I haven’t sighted her. When did Ray King die, Mum?’

  ‘July of ’58. During the floods. Why?’

  ‘I was just working out if that baby could be his. I wonder how long she’s been on with Jim Hooper.’

  ‘She broke up her sister’s wedding by getting pregnant to him, I can tell you that. He was engaged at one time to Sissy Morrison.’

  ‘Hang on. She’s just come out with the two Halls. They’re walking towards the car. Jesus! She has come up in the world! She just got into the driver’s seat. I’m hanging up, Mum. Jim’s out, looking at the roses. I
’m going to pop in and welcome him home while she’s not around. Call me back in fifteen minutes.’

  Jen and Jim’s every move was reported that day. Robert Fulton, who had played cricket with Jim before the war, knocked on Vern’s door at six, after he’d closed his shop. He didn’t drive away until seven. The town would get nothing out of him. The Fultons were a close-mouthed lot, as was John McPherson and Amy, his schoolteacher wife, who were invited inside at seven-thirty and didn’t leave until after ten.

  For days Jenny Morrison and Jim Hooper were discussed beneath the butcher’s veranda, in the newspaper shop, on telephones, over fences, though not in Charlie’s shop. Women eyed Georgie when they popped in for a pound of sugar, a few working so hard on questions they could legitimately ask that they forgot what they’d come in to buy.

  Thank God for Maisy Macdonald. She called on the couple with one of her lemon meringue pies and came away full of information.

  Trudy Juliana Hooper had been born on 11 April. She’d arrived two months early, and spent her first two months of life in hospital, a lot of that time in an oxygen crib. Maisy told the town that Jenny and Jim Hooper had been together since the night of the Magpies and the Demons grand final, twelve months ago.

  ‘Allowing for it to have been born two months early, she had her pants off that same night,’ the people said.

  *

  Trudy could have been Jim’s. She had Teddy’s brown eyes, his long legs, no hair yet, or not enough to say if it would be dark or fair.

  Margot wore the scar of her caesarean birth, though no one, other than the Hall family, Georgie, Jack Thompson, Jenny, Jim, Vroni Andrews, her doctor partner, the medical staff at the Frankston hospital and a Frankston solicitor knew it – more than enough without Maisy, great-grandmother to that baby, knowing. She hadn’t been told, wouldn’t be told. According to Elsie, Margot had suffered a nervous breakdown. On her return to town, Margot had explained her illness to Maisy as indigestion and constipation.

  She never looked at that scar, never touched it, never stood naked when there was light enough to see it.

  There was a second scar on her belly, to the side, smaller, shaped like an eye, where she’d pushed the three-inch blade of Jenny’s vegetable knife in deep enough to let the air out of her belly. It had worked too. They’d put her to sleep at the hospital and when she’d woken up her indigestion had gone.

  For a long time, Elsie convinced herself that Margot would come around, that she’d agree to marry Teddy and raise her own baby. A born mother, Elsie, a mother since Joey’s birth when she was twelve or thirteen years old, a mother to her nephew and niece and to five more of her own and Harry’s – and to Margot. Elsie never mentioned the scars, to Trudy or Margot. She’d wanted to raise her granddaughter, but for Margot’s sake had delayed bringing the baby home. Jenny and Jim had saved her making the choice between Margot and Trudy.

  At forty-eight, Elsie’s hair was a salt and pepper grey. Her lighter hair colouring darkened her complexion, making her touch of colour more obvious. She still raised a few stares when she came into town, which she did, daily now.

  It was assumed by most she’d been given the job of nursemaid. Vern Hooper had always employed someone to do his dirty work. It was generally agreed that Jenny Morrison thought she was someone, living in Vern Hooper’s house, driving her latest husband around in a brand-new car.

  ‘Have you found out what happened to her dark-headed girl?’

  ‘Her mother claimed her.’

  ‘Mother? Jenny had her to that Vinnie dago bloke, didn’t she?’

  ‘I’ve told you before. Ray brought those two kids with him when he came back. It’s turned out that he stole them from their mother while she was in hospital, or so Maisy says.’

  ‘I never did like the look of that man. You remember how his mother died?’

  Give a kid a new toy and in days the novelty will wear off and he’ll swap it or leave it out in the weather. The novelty wore off Jenny, Jim and their baby. Within two weeks Jenny could back that fancy car out and turn it towards Forest Road or Willama, and not a curtain would lift nor a phone ring.

  CHARLIE’S ACCIDENT

  On the second Sunday in October an ambulance screamed its bad news through town. A hit-and-run driver had knocked Charlie White off his bike, out on Cemetery Road. With no house now where he might visit his Jeany, each Sunday he’d been riding his bike out to the cemetery to sit and talk with her a while.

  A crowd gathered to watch the ambulance take him away. He looked dead. Joss Palmer, an army medic during the war, diagnosed a smashed leg and arm and a dented head.

  ‘What a way to go,’ the people said.

  ‘At his age, he never should have been riding that bike.’

  ‘Hilda tried to put him in the old folks’ home a year ago. That redhead should have left him where he was put.’

  Anyone who knew Charlie knew he didn’t take chances on his bike. He’d been riding it for as long as Georgie could remember. She phoned his granddaughter. The cop who had replaced Jack Thompson, who would never replace him, came back from wherever he’d been all day. Georgie and Joss Palmer spoke to him. He barely knew old Charlie White. Didn’t care about him.

  He knew his age, and when they told him Charlie had always been a careful rider, he doubted their word. They told him about Charlie’s trouble with the feral tenants, and of the robbery, how one of the blokes locked up for the robbery had been married to a Duffy, that the Duffy family owned land just out past the cemetery, and at any given time there were car loads of drunken fools speeding in and out of that place.

  The new copper drove out there. The Duffy family had seen nothing and knew nothing – which most in town would agree was pretty close to right.

  No one had seen the impact. Two kids had seen a dark blue car racing off, then turning right onto South Road.

  Long gone, back to the city, or back to where it’d come from. And finding out who had hit him wouldn’t do Charlie a lot of good anyway. He wasn’t dead but close to it. The doctor Georgie spoke to didn’t expect him to live through the night. He’d snapped his shin and thigh bones, broken his arm and maybe his collarbone. They didn’t waste any plaster on him.

  ‘We’re keeping him comfortable,’ he said.

  They kept him comfortable through the night, through the next day, and still no plaster.

  ‘We’re keeping him pain-free,’ a sister said. ‘Has his family been told?’

  They didn’t know Charlie White’s family. They didn’t know old Charlie either. He regained consciousness on the third morning.

  The young doctor didn’t know Georgie, but she was beginning to know herself. She attacked him verbally, as Gertrude might have. He wasted a lot of plaster on Charlie that day, and that night Georgie sat with the old man, feeding him slices of preserved peach from a can. With one arm in plaster and the other shoulder out of action, he couldn’t feed himself.

  ‘Did I ever tell you that your blood is worth bottling, Rusty?’ he said, slurping peach slices from a fork.

  ‘A few times, Charlie.’

  She told him she’d given Emma Fulton a job for a while. Charlie trusted the Fultons, and Emma was always available when they called. The shop wasn’t much more than a one-man business. Georgie could have managed it alone, had there not been more than Charlie and that shop on her mind.

  Too much more on her mind. Jenny and Jim, and Jack Thompson who wouldn’t stop phoning, and Margot. She was in hospital too, with a miscarriage this time, thank God – and even Elsie saying thank God – and telling Georgie every second breath to marry Jack, or to move into town with Jenny and Jim.

  There were four spare bedrooms in Vern Hooper’s house, large rooms, with floors that didn’t rock and a huge empty sitting room, a library too, with bookshelves on two walls and only a bare scattering of books on them. Verandas to sit on, lawns to walk on and all Georgie’s for the taking – as was Jack Thompson’s two-bedroom East Malvern flat.

  T
hey moved Charlie down to the old folks’ annex when they realised he wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t happy.

  ‘Half of ’em are gaga,’ he said. And no doubt a damn sight easier on the staff than he. He demanded trousers. They clad him in a gown.

  ‘They can’t get trousers on you, Charlie. Start behaving yourself or they’ll start putting you in pink gowns.’

  Hated leaving him there in his nightgown. Hated going home too. Hated driving by Hooper’s corner, scared stiff that Jenny had gone and made another mistake.

  All of her life, Georgie had known about Jim Hooper. She’d imagined him to be something more than the lanky yard of pump water that he was, who limped like Vern Hooper had limped and at times resembled his father, or his hair and his jaw did. Different eyes, nose, probably a different personality, not that she’d seen enough of any personality yet to be sure on that point.

  She hadn’t seen a lot of Margot’s baby either – and didn’t want to. It had spent weeks in an oxygen crib. Kids who spent too much time in those cribs came out of them with problems. A reader, Georgie, a hoarder of useless information, and one who had lived too long with Donny to want to go through that again.

  As had Jenny. And Georgie didn’t understand her, and at times wondered if she’d ever known her. The Jenny she’d known wouldn’t have lived in Vern Hooper’s house. He’d kidnapped Jimmy, or his daughter had. Vern might have been dead, but to Georgie that house represented what he’d been. And she’d given up Raelene.

  Twelve months ago Georgie had a little sister. Now she didn’t. Like with Jimmy. She’d had a brother – then she hadn’t. Twelve months ago, she’d had Jenny. Lost her too. And now she’d lost Charlie to the old fogies’ home.

  She had a chance to clean up the storeroom while he was away and was considering taking his overcoat down to him, to cover his gowns, when she lifted it from its hook behind the shop’s back door. And found his share certificates, on a wire spike, hung over that same hook, a pile of them. She tossed the overcoat and stood, bug-eyed, leafing through flyspecked, yellowing paper. Valuable paper some of it.